What about sharing our personal experiences with building silent, flexible home audio/entertainment devices? This was my first time - and the choice of components was not easy ! Very often, you can't have both speed and silence. Here's what I did.

The following components were modified:- cpu was underclocked and heavily under-volted (running as 1500+ @ 1.2V). Can also run ~1200MHz @ 1.1V.- Radeon 9000 pro was modified for passive cooling- northbridge fan of the motherboard was replaced with passive cooling solution.- HDD was put in silent 5 1/4'' acoustic armor.- the case was stuffed with custom acoustic damping material.

Results:- there are two fans in the system (PSU & CPU), one of which can be deactivated.- runs smoothly at 1500+, 1.2V, ~40 Celsius with big, silent 600RPM fan to blow some air into the case (no fan is fine also: ~42-55 Celsius depending on cpu voltage).- pc is near-silent (just about "undetectable" from 30cm distance).

Additional thoughts:- I'll add a soundcard and a LAN card (no fans, so no problem)- I'm still hesitating about what DVD-rom drive I'll put in there.- I've put the 7200RPM HDD because that's all I had.. but maybe I'll replace it with a 5400RPM (or lower) one.- operating system not chosen yet.

Epilogue / What I learned:- I'm VERY satisfied with this silent PC.- In the future I'll be careful about the noise when buying components for other pc's.- There's no way I'd buy a GeForce FX (think noise..)- Silent machines need more expensive cooling components, but I think it's really worth it !

Most of their complaints had the tone of armchair quarterback, like how could he measure that quiet becausethe meter would be very expensive? I believe the measuring equipment (and as I mentioned, the measuringroom) were borrowed.

Anyway, their complaints were fair. There's no meter able to reach -30 dB, as the author of the article supposedly claimed he had access to. In fact, -30 dB levels are not possible in this world. I find really surprising that just by dampening you get a noise of just 8 dB. Just breathing causes a higher noise. I wonder if any of us has ever been at a place more quiet than 15 dB. Hey, a very silent room is around 25-30 dB.

Edit: The guy used a Larson Davis 824 sound level meter. Looking at his specs, its noise floor is at around 16 dBA, so there's no way he could realiabily measure a level of 0-5 dB at the testing room as he claims. Also, he claims a level of 8 dB at 120 Hz and above, when the noise floor over 500 Hz is of around 12 dB and more.